Updates from the edge of the Web

Poetry and Pragmatics – the Weave version

John Lilly, Mozilla’s CEO, recently talked about the concept of poetry and pragmatics of Mozilla as an organization. He defined it as: “The pragmatics of an organization are how you do things; the poetry of an organization is why you do them.”

Poetry and pragmatics play a somewhat similar role in the case of Mozilla Labs, in general and the Weave project specifically.

We run a lot of projects in Labs such as Weave, Ubiquity, Jetpack etc. Each of these projects stretch the boundaries of our web experiences.

Through the Weave project, for example, we want to reclaim the vision of the browser acting as a true user-agent on the web. We want to help broker user data in a secure and private manner. We want to build the foundational, open source building blocks upon which an entire new generation of web applications will be built. We want to enable the poetry so succinctly captured by Mitchell when she says: “I am not a number“.

The pragmatics helps us realize that we can not deliver this entire vision in one go. Over the past few months, we’ve been experimenting with a couple of building blocks upon which together we can bring the broader vision to life – synchronization and identity. Guided by a core set of principles, we’ve identified several compelling use cases that can be built on top of sync and identity.

What’s next?

We are very excited to announce that we are going to focus on promoting Sync and later Identity to be production quality features within Weave. They will become the first components of what we are provisionally calling the Weave Platform.

Version 1.0 of the Weave Platform will be focused on the Sync component. Our goal is to make this available more widely as an add-on for Firefox before the end of 2009.

So, what does this mean for our experiments? They will undoubtedly continue. We’ll explore new ideas and different spaces as we build a platform that enables all of us to have incredibly rich, personalized experiences across the web while being firmly in control of our data.